6
Authors of Modern America
F. Scott Fitzgerald
September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940
American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age, his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). His private life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became almost as celebrated as his novels.
Ernest Hemingway
July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961
Born in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the 1953 Pulitzer. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.
William Faulkner
1897 - July 6, 1962
T. S. Eliot
1888 - 1965
American writer William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. Much of his early work was poetry, but he became famous for his novels set in the American South, frequently in his fabricated Yoknapatawpha County, with works that included The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! His controversial 1931 novel Sanctuary was turned into two films, 1933's The Story of Temple Drake as well as a later 1961 project. Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature and ultimately won two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards as well. He died on July 6, 1962.
T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He published his first poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion. The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and become one of the most talked about poems in literary history. For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.